REVIEW: For Real

LITTLE GIRL BLUE

Sona Jain’s For Real is one of those well-meaning films one can’t dislike, but is unable to like either. 

The impact of the parents’ problems on a child’s mind—particularly at a time when most urban families are nuclear—is not something that has been dealt with much in Indian cinema, so it’s good to see a filmmaker trying to enter that minefield.

A casual remark by her brother, leads six-year-old Shruti (Zoya Hasan) to believe that her real mother has been substituted by an alien. Something else has been troubling the child and her innocent mind is not able to understand or articulate it. It is easier for her to escape into a world of fantasy, dreams and this bizarre alien theory.

Trouble is brewing between her parents Priya (Sarita Choudhury) and Ravi Adil Hussain), though the brother Paras (Sriharsh Sharma) remains unaffected.  Shruti suddenly becomes a problem child, and much to her parents’ dismay, withdraws into a shell her parents are unable to crack.

The father, a doctor, is already too harried, the mother, tries to go about her day normally, and spends her angst lying in the bathtub in ‘artistic’ poses.

Jain is somehow able to connect to the child, more so because she has cast a normal-looking little girl and not a deliberately cute or precocious kid to tug at heart strings.  However, she fails to bring to life the problems of the grown-ups, and that keeps the film at a very superficial level.

It is not clear whether the tension between the parents is building up over period of time—the quarrel that pushes everything over the edge remains annoyingly trivial.  What role the family friend and psychiatrist (Sameer Dharmadhikari) plays in the whole domestic drama, remains hazy too.

Priya, while doing her motherly duties diligently, also comes across as a bit self-absorbed, and the character is given particularly stilted dialogue.  The viewer is also left to read between the lines to guess if Ravi is really a bad husband who choked his wife’s ambitions, or that his work just kept him to busy to care for her and the children’s needs.

In the end, the film just gives off low-budget vibes, that do not translate into the audience-friendliness of some recent almost-shoestring films like Udaan and Tere Bin Laden.

As far as performances go Sarita Choudhury’s Dilli memsaab with London accent act doesn’t work at all, and the two men look lost and hopeless, which they probably were in their sketchy parts.  It’s left to the two kids to salvage the film then, and they do…but not enough for you to empathise with them.  You do, however, have total sympathy for any parent who has to put up with a food-flinging, tantrum-throwing child.